Indie Development Blog

New Programmer!

Meetings meetings meetings

The SkyLab team just wrapped up 51/2 hours of of meetings…*whew*. After briefly going over this week’s progress, we discussed a myriad of decisions ranging from game design, to art direction, to tools implementation.

We solidified several design decisions that were sort of up in the air, we concretely determined what pieces of beta feedback we would take into account, and we talked about how all these choices would inform the art direction (and how the art direction should inform these choices). The new art style is still in it’s infancy and undergoing rapid iteration, so we can’t announce or show anything just yet (sorry!) but we’re making progress.

New Programmer!

Although he’s already been with us for a week, we’re excited to officially announce the signing of Tyler Hiemke to the SkyLab development team! He joins us with extensive indie development experience creating the world-building tool Caeludum.

With Tyler, we discussed how to go about implementing a better automated maze generation tool. Our previous tool was text based – take a text file representation of a maze (autogenerated by script, modified by hand) and build the maze in Unity. With Tyler’s expertise, we’re going to build an interactive in-editor tool that allows easier and faster level design changes, while still giving us the time-saving benefit of automated generation.

Tyler will also be helping us support a new tile-based grid layout, which I’ll be implementing to create a 3-lane movement system (one of the more common pieces of feedback we got, and just one of many design decisions we made today).

Why do I care?

What this means for those reading, is that the next beta release (0.4) will not be out anytime soon. Instead of pushing for weekly release cycles like the past 3 versions, we plan on taking the next month to implement all of these design choices and new art direction before returning to the more rapid weekly cycle. So, see ya in a month!